IT Marketing: Finding Prospect Lists

After you write your long sales letter, you need to know who to send it to. In this article, you ll learn where to find an advertising list and trade organization listings to help with your IT marketing efforts.
Advertising Lists
For list selection, you have many choices. If you re looking for recommendations, especially in the U.S., it s really simple. You have list compiler companies like Zap Data (http://www.zapdata.com>), and InfoUSA (http://www.infousa.com>). For your IT marketing, they re a good place to start. Tip: For renting mailing lists outside the U.S., start looking at:
Accountable List Brokers - http://www.listbroker.com.au> in Australia List Angels - http://www.listangels.co.uk> in the United Kingdom InfoUSA also has Canadian lists http://www.infousa.com>
To go deeper, look at the local chambers and the industry trade groups where you can skim out some additional contact information for your IT marketing list. And certainly don t overlook your local newspapers and business journals for additional leads.
Getting Involved in Trade Organizations
Over time, you will build up your IT marketing client list and end up with two clients that are, for example, dentists. You have experience in installing small LANs and setting up networks and all the X-ray, digital imaging software and all the patient chart management. You know exactly what to do with a dentist s office. So it makes sense to look for other prospects that are just like these dentists because it s a lot easier to sell to them.
Hang out Where Your Clients Do
The best way to reach those kinds of prospects is to look around for the trade groups that this particular occupation or industry would belong to. Go to their meetings and conferences, and take out a table in their local expos. Become active so you can be a panelist on something technology-related or write an article for one of their industry publications. The key here is to get referrals.
Don t Over-do It
Don t run out to join more than two or three industry organizations at a time because that can easily take up a big chunk of your week. Ease into this over the next couple of months and get reasonably active. Don t get to the point that it starts digging into your job like getting on the board of directors or anything thing like that. But you do need to go to the meetings. If you go a few times a year, you will start meeting enough people to make the word of mouth referral potentially significant.
The Bottom Line on IT Marketing
In IT marketing, finding your potential customers is paramount. To build your prospect list, buy or rent some advertising lists and go to the industry events of your customers. Become reasonably active in these organizations so you can build your referral business.
About the Author
Joshua Feinberg helps small business computer consulting firms get more steady high-paying clients. Sign-up now for Joshua s free one-hour audio training on Small Business Computer Consulting secrets at http://www.SmallBusinessComputerConsulting.com



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Free Alternative To Microsoft Office

Anyone who ever priced the Microsoft Office Suite knows it represents a significant investment.
A quick check of the CompUSA.com website shows Microsoft Office Standard costs $399 and Microsoft Office Professional will set you back $449. Now, this doesn t discount the value of the software.
In fact, the functionality in MS Office represents the true workhorse of home and small business computing, namely: word processing (Word), spreadsheets (Excel), presentations (PowerPoint), and desktop database applications (Access).
However, with the cost for such functionality at a premium, it comes as no surprise that a viable alternative emerged to challenge Microsoft s position atop the office application market.
OpenOffice.org offers a suite of office software applications free to download for anyone with a computer, including PC s operating with Windows or Linux.
Open Office also offers a free version for Macintosh computers.
Open Office offers its software freely to anyone who wants to download it.
Their all-volunteer organization, sponsored in large part by Sun Microsystems, operates with the noble goal of making productivity software available worldwide in 36 languages, particularly to economies that simply can t afford the cost of other office solutions.
The Open Office software publishes in the Open Document Format to make data universally available (instead of using proprietary file formats that, for instance, make it hard to share between Microsoft Word and Word Perfect).
Open Office contains several main components, each of which help the user with specific tasks.
Writer - This software offers a full-featured word-processing program enabling the user to type letters, brochures, faxes, even entire books. No matter what you need to type, this program lets you do it. It also offers such features as spell check, auto-correction, and thesaurus.
Calc - Calc offers a spreadsheet program enabling the user to create cells containing text or digits, execute simple and complex calculations, database functions, and more. Calc is perfect for accounting spreadsheets, inventory and more.
Impress - Impress enables the user to create "slideshow" presentations containing text and images for use in sales or group presentations. Impress also allows the user to create impressive slide transition effects and eye-catching animation.
Draw - Draw gives the user the ability to create simple to complex drawings using vector graphics. Users can create drawings by hand, or incorporate an array of existing shapes, arrows, lines and other graphics.
Though it does represent an excellent alternative to expensive office software suites, Open Office is not without a few drawbacks.
Since they make the software available free of charge, tech support for the free version only lasts 30 days. Also, by its nature, the software is a "work in progress."
As such, you will find bugs periodically that should get reported to the Open Office website so they can fix them.
However, despite these drawbacks, Open Office software rates a "must look" if you need word processing, spreadsheets and other capabilities we ve naturally come to associate with home and small business computing.
Copyright 2005 Jim Edwards



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